In recent years, telecommunication devices have advanced from offering simple voice calling services within wireless communication networks to providing users with many new features. Telecommunication devices now provide messaging services such as email, text messaging, and instant messaging; data services such as Internet browsing; media services such as storing and playing a library of favorite songs; location services; and many others. Thus, telecommunication devices, referred to herein as user devices or mobile devices, are often used in multiple contexts. In addition to the new features provided by the telecommunication devices, users of such telecommunication devices have greatly increased. Such an increase in users is only expected to continue and in fact, it is expected that there could be a growth rate of twenty times more users in the next few years alone.
In general, a performance of wireless communication networks can be improved by reducing a distance between users and base stations that handle the traffic within the wireless communication networks. In some instances, the base stations control telecommunication device traffic within a macro cell. Those macro cells usually include a single base station. The closer a user is to the base station, the more efficient the service provided to the user. For example, a user close to the edge of the macro cell may achieve only five megabits (Mb) per second of performance with a telecommunication device, while a user closer to the base station may achieve a 50 Mb per second performance with a telecommunication device.
To help address such performance issues within wireless networks, heterogeneous networks have been created. In such heterogeneous networks, the macro cells are divided into smaller cells generally referred to as femtocells, pico cells, micro cells, or the like. Each macro cell often remains controlled by a high-power node or base station, while the small cells are often controlled by lower power nodes or access points. The access points control traffic of telecommunication devices within their corresponding small cells.
Generally, the access points are omni-directional antennas and, thus, broadcast wireless signals in all directions. However, the broadcast wireless signals can interfere with each other from multiple omni-directional antennas. Such wireless signal interference is generally also true for small cells utilizing uni-directional or bi-directional antennas when the antennas at least partially face each other.